


the most elegant weapon

by Alias (anafabula)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Creative use of Beholding powers, Dehumanization, Gen, Minor Character Death, Monstrosity discourse, Nebulous season 3 AU (to allow for more discourse), Vignettes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-09-01 15:40:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20260483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: This man captured and threatened the Archivist, tried to, and let him speak, Jon thinks: vicious, a little like a prayer. He deserves what he gets. He deserves everything he gets.





	the most elegant weapon

**Author's Note:**

> It’s worth it to me to note that I wrote the lot of these thirteen months ago and then sat on it this long because I wasn’t used to considering this kind of thing potentially standalone. A year later I would be (and am!) dealing in very different materiel, if still going for arcs over impressions, because canon marches on; but I am, I think, also a bit more comfortable with this kind of a moment in time than I was.
> 
> Also [someone I trust on the matter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nelja/pseuds/Nelja-in-English) asked why I hadn’t published this as a stand-alone/vignette and I mulled it over for most of the year in question; the answer was “I’m scared it’s improper to display”, and the canon-typical excuse for ‘I don’t want to reveal this thing. LOOK AT THE THING’ is _right there_, I mean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter-specific trigger warning in the end notes.

It's easy, is the thing, deadly easy for Jon to draw the power of compulsion up to his lips. He's exhausted and probably still bleeding, and two years ago that would have put the act beyond him. Now even in his day-to-day life it's all Jon can do to keep every simple gust of inquiry from coming out with punitive force. Especially given it gets Jon what he wants and the Archivist needs.

(Or the other way around? Either. Both. Now really isn't the time for that debate, anyway.)

So the power comes easy and welcome; it makes Jon feel better, makes him forget the hard crease of pain in the folding of his bound shoulders and the blood crusted down from hairline to eyebrow. He hears the recorder left abandoned on his desk click back on, even if the man glaring halfheartedly at him doesn't, and some part of Jon unspools entirely into comfort at that. The inhuman bit of him, presumably, unconcerned with being restrained as long as he's still somewhere there's more to know. Certain, abruptly, that if he can hear and speak and the tape is rolling behind him, then surely sooner or later he'll be fine.

Jon knows the reassurance is false: if he were about to die the Beholding would want to know that just as much. Maybe more. (Is there tape of Gertrude's death? There _must_ be—he needs to get through this and find it—_don't get distracted, Jon_, he thinks with a kind of self-deprecating savagery, and all the while the man left to menace Jon stares through him.) But that does nothing to help how much the tension of his spine seems to believe it, his strained taut lines releasing when he speaks, Jon's own fear beginning to dissipate with the expectation of another's.

"Tell me what I'd have to do to get you to untie me," Jon says first, in case kindness can work. “To untie me and let me go.”

“Nothing,” the man says immediately, personhood that was dully absent splashing back into him and overrunning a being seemingly unused to the practice. “I'll never do that. I can't betray Miss Rayner's orders—I _won't.”_

And Jon was expecting that, really. The dread doesn't come back. (Rayner. Of course. A second try at a new body, some benighted splinter sect, whatever—God just forbid anything ever be over with.) "Did she send you here? Is she here now?"

"No," the man says, blinking. "No." Jon had suspected as much; he doesn't seem to be the brightest bulb in the cult’s drawer—metaphorically speaking, anyway—pathetically inept, compared to monsters that have posed Jon real inconveniences, as they are, these are also still acolytes of the Dark he's dealing with, in some form or another—and the confirmation does more good than harm overall, Jon thinks, even if it means the man's useless as a witness.

"What's your name?" It's easier every time, and easier to make sure Jon leaves the dazed man no room to realize what's happening.

“Alistair Clark.” He does blink at that. “Wait—”

“Does your Miss _Rayner_ know you're here?”

“No. She—she disavowed us. I—”

“Who is ‘us’? Tell me what—tell me what you’re doing, who you are. Names.”

“There's five of us. Amanda Conlee, Brian Durham, Nate Viglione, Colin—I don't—I don't know his last name. Miss Rayner said we were—untrue, unfaithful, undeserving of the sacraments, and only she has the real ones so I—”

"All five of you are here?"

"Yes. We knew she hated you, that you—scurry around with torches, that you abhor us, so we thought, if we found her enemies, if we proved—”

"What else do you know about me?"

“Not much. You all seem harmless. Nerds and crackpots. An easy target. Don't know why she hadn't already dealt with you but I guess I don’t know why she’d bother either. But—”

Jon swallows a laugh as quickly as he can. A nasty one, like ground glass in his throat, only without any of his hate paining Jon himself. "What _exactly_ are you trying to do here?"

“Find—whoever it is she hates. Get them out of the picture. Then she'll take us back! But the others are off looking for real threats—”

"Do you know who I am?" Jon thinks Alistair's earned the cruelty he puts in that question, frankly. That and a lot more, but this is a start.

“No. Your door said—Archivist? Some kind of librarian, I guess, I don’t really care, I just want her t—”

“Hah. I _see._” Jon looks the man over, feeling something coiled up in his teeth, air crackling off the ones revealed by his open mouth. Alistair's looking directly at him and then away in miserable little flashes, dim light collecting on skin clammy with sweat. "What—”

“I don't understand what you're doing,” the man says, gun in his hands trembling in a way Jon profoundly dislikes. “I don't—it burns—stop—please—”

"No," Jon says reflexively, then, "Sure you don't want to let me go?”

“_Yes!”_ Alistair shouts, jittery and fervent. "Maybe we were wrong—maybe the threat is you and if I—”

There is more than just the tremor in the movement of his gun. The blackness inside its barrel is different somehow from the rest of their surrounding dark, immune to the bursts of false light that play erratically on Jon's understimulated field of vision. He is unfortunately certain this little group's ineptitude can't be trusted to extend to their ability to acquire working firearms. That only requires normal human crime and violence, after all, which isn't even Jon's baseline these days.

This man captured and threatened the Archivist, tried to, and let him speak, Jon thinks: vicious, a little like a prayer. He deserves what he gets. He deserves everything he gets.

"_Fine_," Jon says. "So what would I have to say to you right now to make you take that gun and shoot yourself in the head?"

For a moment, Jon can watch the sheer terror work in Alistair's eyes, dim light be damned; he can watch the question take hold while the cultist tries to fight it, how the locked-throat paralysis of fear transmutes itself into volubility.

If anything could carry Jon through what happens next, it's that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Specific warning: offscreen forced suicide, gun violence.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Next: _“What_ did _you say to him, Jon?”_

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to the indispensable [umbel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/umbel) for aid in typing, also | [on the title](https://www.artic.edu/artworks/151321/untitled-fear-is-the-most-elegant-weapon-from-inflammatory-essays)


End file.
